Local Version Of China's Great Firewall Now Required On All PCs In China

from the yeah,-that'll-work... dept

There have been plenty of stories on the inner workings of China's "Great Firewall," whereby various ISPs are threatened with liability if they don't block "bad stuff." Yet, it's all been done at the ISP level. Apparently, that's about to change. A report is making the rounds that, as of July 1st, all PCs sold in China will be required to have client-side censorship software. You have to wonder if the censorship software also includes spying software.... Either way, you have to imagine it won't take long at all for people to figure out how to disable such software.

France ahead of China this time around

It seems like the western countries copy the surveilance efforts of China, but this time around France actually seems to be ahead China with their plan to oblige people to install state-approved "anti piracy" security software on every computer of every home with Internet access in France.

Might not be that easy

The tech people for the Chinese government are probably not idiots who would make it possible to simply install a new OS and get rid of the software. If you don't have the software installed, your ISP's routers probably won't event talk to you.

Basically, this would DRM everything sent over the Internet. Someone will figure out how to get around it, but it probably won't be as easy as going to "Add/Remove Programs" or installing a Linux distro.

Why doesn't every computer sold there just come with am armed guard who will shoot the user in the back of the head the first time they access something they're not supposed to? You know the government would do it if they could...

Data overload anyone

Can you imagine have every computer in China reporting back what it does and when? How the heck would you even deal with that data? I would think it would just be so much data that the noise totally overwelms any signel you hope to get.

Starts as an Add-On...

This will start as an add-on and before you know it, it will be required for Microsoft to sell its OS in China that it be bundled in at the Kernel level. I wouldn't doubt if they also start using some sort of Smart Card in combination with it.

It is all about control and if you control the core network, you can control what people are doing on it.

Let's hope this is a wake up call that we need to preserve and prevent this crap from happening here - before we hear how it will protect the children!

Either way, you have to imagine it won't take long at all for people to figure out how to disable such software.

Having a firewall at access level and a filtering program at local would make it very easy to detect who is using the software and who is not. This could lead to authorities investigating and probably ending up prosecuting the people not using the software for some reason or another.